Grow Your Own – Baby, It’s Cold Outside…
by John Weckerle
…But not so cold that we’re not thinking about growing vegetables and the subsequent feasting.
January’s far too early to plant outdoors and a little early for starting most seeds, but it’s certainly not too early to start conceptualizing with respect to the coming season. After reviewing the lessons learned from Bed 5 over the last couple of years (particularly those associated with muddy shoes, holes in soaker hose and fighting through a jungle to get to the produce), we’ve decided that it would be more effective to construct individual raised beds within the structure to use water more efficiently and make maintenance and harvesting easier. We are also still deciding whether to do a little reinforcing on the existing hoop structure or go to a wider diameter PVC – something we can do either in the Spring or the Fall, depending on what time permits, and when.
In the spirit of planning, we decided to check out the fully functional, 30-day free trial of the Mother Earth News Vegetable Garden Planner ($25 annual subscription, but no credit card required for the trial) as a way to work out the revamped arrangement of Bed 6. This is a slick tool capable of some fairly complicated layouts, and it includes features including a plant database that automatically calculates spacing for the veggies. Subscribers can receive e-mail reminders regarding when to plant various veggies, which can be a big help with succession planting. We came up with this preliminary layout which also includes the repurposed Beds 1 and 2:
Preliminary Garden Layout – Beds 1, 2, and 5.
We knocked this out in a short time this morning, so those who don’t wish to subscribe to the planner can at least get a layout together easily during the 30-day trial. Some the labels – bok choy, lettuce, and others – are a little difficult to see in this figure, but overall this worked out very well, and with very little effort. Some things may change, but this gave us the opportunity to quickly design a vegetable patch that will a) produce food, and b) be a much more pleasant place in which to work. This was actually quite a bit of fun, and we recommend that those of our readers who are planning on gardening this year sign up for the free trial and take it for a spin.
One Response “Grow Your Own – Baby, It’s Cold Outside…”
This looks like an engineer who gardens. Kudos for your planning and commitment to briging the best fresh produce to your table. BTW, have you read “On the Grid” by Scott Huler? I’m reading it now, pretty good overview of the systems that make our world work,